Hong kong

The decision to sentence Jimmy Lai to 20 years in jail in Hong Kong is no surprise, but it is no less shocking or heartbreaking. For his family, especially his courageous wife Teresa, son Sebastien and daughter Claire, who have advocated so tirelessly for their father over the past five years, one can only imagine the pain and grief they feel. Sebastien and Claire have walked the corridors of power in Washington, DC, London, Ottawa, Brussels, Paris and beyond, and sat in television studios for hour after hour, seemingly to no avail. For Hong Kong, this is yet another dark day, yet another nail in the coffin of the city’s freedoms. And for everyone who cares about liberty, the rule of law and basic human rights, this sentence is a punch in the solar plexus.

Forty years ago this Christmas I visited Hong Kong for the first time — a few days after the signing in Beijing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration that sealed the former colony’s transfer to mainland rule in 1997. It was a moment of apprehension, but at least the timetable had been set. And how lucky I was to have experienced that extraordinary outpost as it was then, in such contrast to what China’s masters have made it now. The Christmas Day service in St. John’s Cathedral, overhead fans stirring the turbid air, was a poignant glimpse of Hong Kong’s past. Norman Foster’s Hongkong Bank building, the most expensive in the world at the time, was approaching completion as a symbol of commercial confidence in the future.

Hong Kong’s top court decided Monday to uphold Jimmy Lai and six other pro-democracy activists’ convictions for their campaigning during the anti-government protests that rocked the city in 2019. In a unanimous agreement, the court dismissed the bid to overturn the convictions of the seven activists.   Among the justices who voted to uphold the conviction was British justice David Neuberger, who is still serving as non-permanent judge in the former British colony.   Lai, seventy-six, the founder of the pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily, was found guilty in 2021 of organizing and participating in an unauthorized assembly in August 2019 during months-long pro-democracy protests in the China-ruled city. He was sentenced to seventeen months in prison.

Remember “Free Tibet?” The Tibetan Freedom Concert, a series of music festivals that began in 1996, featured such impressive acts as the Beastie Boys, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Smashing Pumpkins, Rage Against the Machine, U2 and A Tribe Called Quest. An entire generation of young Americans — enchanted with “the other” of Tibetan Buddhism — had no qualms condemning what they believed to be an authoritarian Chinese regime. And why not? The People’s Republic of China, however much they fumed over international denunciations of the Tibetans, seemed weak, and incapable of silencing the Western entertainment industry’s indignation. These days, not so much. The NBA apologizes for players or coaches who criticize Beijing’s actions in Hong Kong.

No one now denies that Hong Kong is a fiefdom of Beijing. Its democratic leaders have been packed off to prison on spurious grounds or have left the territory, and its street protests have long been beaten to pieces with batons. The 2020 national security law has made mockery of Hong Kong's last shreds of freedom of expression, rendering all criticism of the Chinese Communist Party akin to terrorism; and its uncensored homegrown newspapers are now closed by the state — their proprietors inexorably marched off to jail. Any pretense of adherence to the treaties signed by Britain and China around the time of the handover in 1997 — treaties that guaranteed Hong Kong autonomy — has long fallen away. Hong Kong is a subject province of the People's Republic now, and nothing more.

On October 1 of last year, the New York Times printed an op-ed from Regina Ip, executive council and legislative council of Hong Kong, headlined ‘Hong Kong is China, Like it or Not’.  Ip advocated on behalf of China’s new ‘security’ law in Hong Kong. This law employed harsh police and military tactics to crack down on pro-democracy protests and resulted in the arrest of Apple Daily editor Jimmy Lai. This week, Apple Daily itself was shut down and several of the newspaper’s journalists were also arrested. But recent developments in Hong Kong did not happen overnight and did not happen behind closed doors. They happened in full view of the world.

While final negotiations on the UK’s relationship with the EU continue to drag, No. 10 is moving rapidly to expand Britain’s role in the Indo-Pacific, returning ‘east of Suez’ after a half-century absence. Tied to this goal, Prime Minister Boris Johnson unveiled a modest, yet real, increase in Britain’s defense spending last month, totaling some $21.25 billion and pledging to once again make Great Britain the foremost naval power in Europe. Johnson’s budget announcement sets the stage for implementation of London’s long-awaited ‘Integrated Review’, which is touted as the most significant strategic reassessment of the UK’s diplomatic and security policies since the end of the Cold War.

There was no way to know that the last trip I took to Hong Kong just a few years ago would likely be my last. I assumed we still had another 27 years before Hong Kong and China’s ‘one country, two systems’ framework reached its end, but Beijing had other plans. Increasingly emboldened in its domestic social control and assertive in its foreign policy, the Chinese government broke its promise when it sidestepped Hong Kong’s legislature to pass a sweeping national security law targeting ‘secession’, ‘subversion’ and ‘collusion’. These concepts are so broadly-defined as to be easily weaponized against even a nominal critic of the CCP, with a possibility of life in prison as punishment.

As soon as the unrest began in Minneapolis, the inevitable comparisons with Hong Kong began. We saw throngs of masked demonstrators take to the streets holding placards and chanting slogans while police in riot gear discharged rubber bullets, pepper spray and tear gas. We saw skirmishes in which protesters were pinned to the ground with excessive force. We saw smoldering barricades and burning police vehicles. But that’s where the superficial similarities between the two protest movements end. Hong Kong’s protests began as a revolt against the controversial extradition bill (which would have allowed extraditions to mainland China). It built upon past pro-democracy movements and morphed into an existential battle against the Chinese Communist party.

A successful dictator has to have ruthlessness, control, influence and competence. So how does China’s leader, Xi Jinping, rate as a dictator? Xi has been in power since 2012 and thus has enough of a track record to judge.On ruthlessness, he ranks highly. The concentration camps he has created for China’s Muslim minority in Xinjiang and the suppression of the movement in Hong Kong — in violation of the 1984 agreement with the UK — are the most tangible examples. The November 2019 leak of the 'Xinjiang Papers', more than 400 pages of internal Chinese documents, to The New York Times provided an unprecedented documentation of the origins and implementation of crackdown against Muslims of Xinjiang.

This weekend saw the most violent clashes yet in Hong Kong between demonstrators and riot police. On Sunday, as mass protests entered their 12th week, Hong Kong police deployed water cannons, tear gas and rubber bullets, and a policeman pointed a gun at a protester and the press. Meanwhile, dissidents threw bricks and grates that they had dug out from the street at riot police. They returned volleys of tear gas canisters with tennis rackets, threw homemade petrol bombs and Molotov cocktails, and used  lasers to thwart facial recognition cameras.

Over the past several months, we have witnessed remarkable courage in the streets of Hong Kong. What began as limited protest against a single act of pro-Beijing legislation now has the markings of existential struggle, if not revolution. As the people of Hong Kong understand, the city government’s proposed extradition bill — enabling removal of its citizens to mainland China for trial — was not an isolated event. It was, instead, a sign of things to come, the gradual encroachment of Beijing upon the rights and freedoms promised Hong Kong for 50 years in the 1997 Basic Law. These constitutional guarantees — negotiated with the United Kingdom before it transferred the city — have come steadily under attack as the clock ticks ineluctably towards midnight.

The central question regarding the Hong Kong protests is not whether a crackdown is imminent — it’s already happening — but its final form. After more than 60 days of unrest in Hong Kong, Chinese leader Xi Jinping seeks to bring the city under control as quickly as possible, and without using the military. Rather than repeat the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre, Xi wants the repression to occur through aggressive law enforcement and severe punishment, while not yielding an inch to the protesters’ demands. Chinese state propaganda has ominously escalated its rhetoric. The protests are now labeled a ‘color revolution’, and their violence as ‘terrorism'.